Why We Must Reimagine the CBC
- First Posted: Feb 16 2012 00:34 AM
With the health of our media ecology under threat, Canadians need to get directly involved in shaping the future of our public broadcaster.
Canadians know all too well the consequences of a highly concentrated media landscape. Thanks to the dominance of the big telecom companies, our vice-like cellphone contracts are among the most expensive in the developed world. It’s a similar story with our internet access: Canadians pay the third-highest price for high-speed service in the developed world. The big telecom companies have such a strong influence over the regulator that only a widespread revolt prevented the destruction of their independent competitors last year.
Control of our broadcasting rests in precious few hands, and the big telecom companies would like to maintain their stranglehold by predetermining what kinds of digital content we can access easily and cheaply. There is very little to prevent them from doing this at the moment. There would be even less in a world without the CBC.
Canada lags seriously in the four key indicators of a healthy digital economy: speed, openness, affordability, and diversity of content. Looking around the world, it is clear that privatizing the media landscape would not inform, engage, entertain, and connect us better, but would instead increase the dominance of those at the top of the media pyramid – the same companies that have shown such disregard for the needs of ordinary Canadians.
As the federal budget announcement looms large over Parliament Hill, those from the big telecom lobby who would dismantle the CBC are out in force, championing concentration over diversity. They have some unwitting allies in those who doubt the CBC’s representativeness and importance in a digital age. The questions they ask – such as whether the CBC is open enough or innovative enough to deserve the public support it gets – are fair and important questions that need to be asked. However, public media is an absolutely crucial part of a healthy media ecology precisely because it operates differently from the private big telecom empires. The CBC is unique because we, as citizens, can get involved directly in shaping its future.
If you feel the CBC has shortcomings, your voice is needed now more than ever to ensure that our public media better serve Canadians. We have to seize the opportunity to make the CBC a leader in participatory, creative, and engaging media.
Seizing this opportunity now means recognizing the importance of the CBC to a healthy digital economy. New cuts, potentially up to $170 million, could put some 1,200 jobs at risk (based on the last round of cuts), adding even more strain to Canadians in these difficult economic times, and pulling the rug out from under the regional services that Canadians rely on to connect with one another.
Cuts would also lead us rapidly in the direction of a system even more dominated by big telecom companies. We need only look to our neighbours to the south to see the disinformation and polarized debate that result from that kind of system.
With so much at stake – the health of Canada’s digital economy, our ability to express ourselves as a nation of diverse communities and cultures, a well-informed and civic-minded populace – it’s time to push back against the big telecom lobby and think big about the CBC.
This is why we at OpenMedia.ca, along with pro-democracy group Leadnow.ca, are launching Reimagine CBC, a new campaign that will engage people from all across the country in a massive brainstorm on the future of public media in Canada.
Reimagining the CBC could mean connecting community stories with professional journalists, making governance structures more accountable to the public, expanding regional services, and experimenting with any of the other innovative suggestions that people are already submitting to our online ideas forum.
Our communities, our cultures, our economies, and our relationships with one another are changing. With the help of new technologies, we’re constantly telling new stories and reinventing old ones. The CBC, as an institution mandated to share those stories, must change along with us. In no way does this demand privatization or abolition. Quite the opposite: It demands new energy, creative thinking, and collaboration from engaged and interested Canadians.
Reimagine CBC is an opportunity for us to be the engine of that creative thinking: to make the CBC ours by building a CBC where innovation, participation, and openness are standard practice.
Photo courtesy of Flickr.
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